To many children of Holocaust survivors, bridging the gulf between their own lives and their parents’ horrific wartime experiences seems virtually impossible. But opening in New York next week are two one-person plays that attempt to do just that by both elucidating and strengthening the bond between the playwrights and the memories of their parents.

Mixing nationalism and religion causes a lot of problems,” mused playwright Misha Shulman as he prepared to debut his new work, “Martyrs Street,” in New York this week. As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes increasingly intractable, Shulman, a former IDF commander, fears that violence will erupt between different groups of Israeli Jews. In his provocative drama, which is set in the West Bank city of Hebron, militant Jews buy a bomb from Hamas in order to kill a dovish, anti-settlement group of Jews in Jerusalem. The extremists in the play, he said, “hijack...